Ethical dilemmas in shadow education research: Lessons from a qualitative study of learners’ experiences in lecture-type tutoring in Hong Kong

Abstract

Ethical considerations arise at every stage in the research process planning the study, recruiting and engaging participants in data collection, analysing the data, and publishing. The principal ethical considerations are causing no harm to participants and a commitment to moral integrity and participants’ rights, consent and confidentiality (Watts 2006; Vainio 2013). However, researchers face dilemmas if strict adherence to specific ethical rules affects what is being studied – perhaps even to the extent of making it impossible to conduct research of the type envisaged (Homan 1991; Wiles et al. 2006; Hammersley 2015). Social research, particularly qualitative research, has experienced controversy because ethical guide-lines are sometimes intentionally vague to allow researchers flexibility to adopt a “situational relativist” approach in which researchers make ethical decisions based on their own ethical or moral standards. Yet while ethical issues have been considered important and influential in research, they “usually remain detached or marginalized from discussions of re-search projects” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2011, p.59). This chapter discusses ethical issues in a one-year qualitative study of Secondary 6 students’ English learning experiences in lecture-type tutoring in Hong Kong. As ethical dilemmas are usually context-specific in social research (Goodwin et al. 2003; Wiles et al. 2006), the chapter first describes the context of the study. It then outlines the research design, and describes the data collection process in the pilot and main study. The section on ethical issues includes focus on informed consent, incentives, building relationships, researcher positioning, and confidentiality and anonymity.